300 million Chinese surfers

InformationWeek is reporting that the number of Internet users in China is nearing 300 million, exceeding the global average for Internet penetration and more than double the online population in 2006. The figures come from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which presumably also has a hand in the Ministry of Public Security’s Golden Shield Project, aka the Great Firewall of China.

There’s an obvious correlation between the growth of Internet penetration and the growth of China’s country-code domain (.cn), with the popularity of the Baidu search engine as the link between them. Despite spirited writings about flat worlds and global citizens, the Internet continues to evolve in large part as a collection of loosely-federated national communities. One wonders – as with evolution – whether it will take a major external disruption to push evolution down a different path.